Antal Szerb and Potlatch

From Homo ludens to The Queen’s Necklace

Abstract

Writing about Antal Szerb’s book reviews, András Beck observes that “thanks to the elegance and economy of his manner of writing, even the shortest ones [reviews] provide the illusion of completeness. One gets the impression that he tells everything worth knowing.” With the example of Szerb’s review of Huizinga’s Homo Ludens (1939), I demonstrate that Beck’s observation is not necessarily correct: while his summary of Huizinga’s work is basically fair, in fact, Szerb adopts a rather peculiar pattern in presenting what he has read. For example, he writes extensively about the celebration, and, when discussing the chapter titled Play and War, instead of describing the relationship of war and play, he offers his own definition of courtly civilisation, based on the Waning of the Middle Ages (Herfsttij der middeleeuwen). Furthermore, in that short review, he gives a disproportionately lengthy description of the potlatch, or of the destruction contest, which he interprets in a particular way. There is no evidence to suggest that the examples of the potlatch had caught Szerb’s attention in the Waning of the Middle Ages (which he translated into Hungarian). Meanwhile, in his later writings, he repeatedly mentions the phenomenon of the potlach.